There are those who would build the Temple,And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.In the days of Nehemiah the ProphetThere was no exception to the general rule.In Shushan the palace, in the month Nisan,He served the wine to the king Artaxerxes,And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;And the King gave him leave to departThat he might rebuild the city.So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,And there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,By the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;No place for a beast to pass.There were enemies without to destroy him,And spies and self-seekers within,When he and his men laid their hands to rebuilding the wallSo they built as men must buildWith the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”, Part IV

Understand: There was nothing about this season, this golden, precious run of games, which was a failure. We fell at the penultimate hurdle. It happens. The scrapes will heal; it will be up to us to keep the memories alive. It will be important we keep these memories alive.

Because surely 2017 will go down in Detroit City Football Club history as end of the pre-history of City. Like childhood, these memories will acquire the golden hue of myth – Mondi with the right foot, forever, amen – as they should. Cyrus gliding through the middle. Dave, exultant, arms outstretched before us. Sebby’s windmill. Shawn’s scoring streak. Spencer Glass with the volley. Lansing 3-3 City. Bakie lofting through-balls. Mondi with the right foot. Mondi with the RIGHT FOOT!! We will need our mythology, our grounding stories, for the onslaught we are about to face.

Until recently, we’ve been nothing more than a nuisance to MLS’ designs on the Detroit market – but the naked avarice of the Gilbert/Gores cash-grab, combined with the fact that MLS’ recent history in populated markets is more colonial than cohabitational, have suddenly brought our opposing ethos into sharp focus as an alternative. We stand at Ground Zero of the enclosure of American soccer pastureland; we serfs would do well to prepare ourselves for the conflict to come.

Unlike those earlier serfs, we have multiple tools available to persuade against the hedging of our shared pasture. We have begun by demonstrating – to interested outside parties, in a way not possible in pastoral England – that our common land is well-maintained; no usufruct challenge here. How many MLS clubs turn a profit, again?

Then there’s the cultural advantage tied up in the fact that basically any recording of Northern Guard shows that it’s a party you’d probably like to be part of, a multi-hued spectrum of nutjobs and halfway-ins and ironic eye-rollers and pure lookie-loos – everyone fits somewhere. And that’s not by accident. There’s no test. There’s no preferred type. Be who you are (not a dick!), stand up, hoot for City: Here endeth the rulebook. And the whole world knows that already! Would it have mattered during Enclosure if the Midlands village could broadcast a highlight reel of its really bangin’ harvest festival?

We have something very special here, something uniquely special in the wide and mind-blowingly various world of football: A locally-owned, community-focused football club in the United States which is wildly successful almost entirely on its own terms. If it’s to remain so, we all have a lot of work ahead of us. And the opposition won’t be content to play it clean and lose; more hurdles await us.

We are intertwined, though. We bear each other up. We can do this. We must do this. It won’t be easy. But what – worth doing – is?

I have a feeling that sharing stories about Tyrone’s winner will become a sort of personal commodity in the years to come, a way of sharing the thing that can only be shared: Knowing. Belonging. Us. These moments of transcendence are not easily brought to be in this world – it’s just too much. Buffer overrun. A burst of white noise like static. I’m crying as I write this – Post Joy Happiness Disorder.

This euphoria was a distillation of an already potent vintage, and on Saturday all of us drank until our only recourse was to hoot at each other in ecstasy, conversations distilled into “!!!!!” and “???!!!!!!” at top volume. Now that we’ve got words back, here’s where I was when Bakie headed that angled ball forward into the space for Tyrone.

The game felt almost too easy until the end. Here was Ann Arbor, these defensive titans, our boogeyman rival, and City had really controlled the game. Caesar tucked the wings in and we played a quicker, short-passing style through the middle, and suddenly the fact that every defender in white was a lights-out tackling machine didn’t matter – City were beating them with movement and technique, and Ann Arbor didn’t have an obvious answer.

If Elon Musk is right, and the universe we live in is a simulation, then apparently Le Rouge is involved in some kinda soccer RPG – how else to explain the absurd pace at which we’ve seen some of these players grow? Omar Sinclar, who last season played centerback in an unsteady defense, has delivered clutch performances on the wing, and oh by the way he’s scored two free kick goals in the last two games, and narrowly missed adding a third with a shot from over 30 yards. Buffer overrun. Wut?

So we rolled into the final 15 minutes two goals clear and it was delightful, I think. There are memories there. I can access them. I don’t quite trust them, though. That person didn’t know.

It was just as Ann Arbor were really coming back into the game – City having abandoned the futsal approach to adopt a more defensive posture – when my wife Sarah suddenly vanished down the tunnel next to where we stand. Before I could turn my attention back to the game, several more people I love hustled into the tunnel, moving with the kind of urgency usually reserved for combat.

This fear has crouched on my shoulder from my first contact with Northern Guard, and I confess it here today: In that moment, I had a vision of the people I love – maybe even Sarah – in a brawl in the very tight confines of that tunnel. And my primate soul ached to join them. There’s so much darkness when people revert to primates down in that tunnel, so much, and football has historically lit that fuse the world over. In one second, I glimpsed that darkness and started to move … when Sarah reappeared, quickly retrieved her camera, and scurried off again, the vision collapsed, leaving me remembering that fear and the ease with which that feeling came ‘round. But this was not a day for darkness.

It sure would seem like it for a while, though. I asked after Sarah and was told conflicting stories – there was an Ann Arbor fan who started a fight, it wasn’t an Ann Arbor fan it was just some guy, it wasn’t a fight but a kid got hurt. All the while the game is going; Ann Arbor just thwacks away at a corner until they barge it in, and the lead’s only one – ugh. Both Ken and Gene are out of the section, Jackie’s lead capo, Sarge on the bass drum. The universe began to conspicuously tilt toward Ann Arbor’s goal and the Weird threatened to rise up and swallow us whole. The Oak went full Charles Reep, bombing the ball forward immediately every possession, and tied the game through Alec Lisinsky’s quality finish.

My heart in my throat, certain that this fallen universe was about to dispense (yet another!) disquisition on the foolishness of really believing in something, I left my place in the Guard to go look for my wife. I found a steady trail of folks who knew where she’d gone, and pieced the story together from them – the kid who’d gotten hurt was actually Ken’s daughter. (She’s maybe the sweetest kid in the universe as currently constituted.) The guy had been subdued by guys from the Guard, who released him as soon as he submitted. Sarah had gone along to the med tent. It’s 2-2 now, and our guys look tired. Extra time and then PKs? Is Sarah ok?

I came upon Karin, Ken’s wife, and the aforementioned daughter just as I entered the north end. Ken’s daughter had an ice pack on her head, and tearfully needed some hugs as Karin recounted her story: Drunk dude tried to start something, resisted being subdued by grabbing a flag and flailing it around until he cracked Ken’s daughter on the skull. The game rolls into extra time as I hug a crying kid and watch her father approach, his face forbidding and thunderclouds trailing in his wake. We shake hands and shake our heads mournfully, unable to shake the feeling that the ice, as ever, is terribly thin, and the water beneath so unspeakably cold. Fifteen minutes ago, we were leading by two goals and Ken’s daughter was unhurt. Now what?

Ken tells me Sarah’s giving a statement to the police. Is gravity working extra hard right now? Time slows as walk through the north end, turning forward and back to see the field then sweep the picnic area, willing some miracle to happen, worried about my wife. There can’t be much time left now. Stephen Carroll slides a ball forward to Shawn Lawson but Ann Arbor breaks it up – I swivel my head back and see Sarah, perfectly fine, looking away from me because she’s talking to Katie and Alex … Bakie has just headed a half-clearance into space for Tyrone and IT IS HAPPENING IT IS HAPPENING.

Six days ago, one of the best of us, Amanda, was nearly taken away. The ice is so, so thin. The water is so, so cold. And somehow all that pain, all that worry informed this moment, this howling embrace of delight, weighted it, gave it contrast – We that are Us will endure. We will be here for each other. When the ice breaks, we are saved by the fact that we are not alone, that we are interlinked; we bear each other up. And when we witness miracles, we never need fear we’ve gone mad, for here are these eminently reasonable souls feeling the same shock and delight. At some point, everyone stopped hugging.

It’s been a hell of a weekend, but in the exactly opposite way I’d usually say “a hell of a weekend.”

I’m not saying anyone should live like I’ve lived. But in my life, “a hell of a weekend” could involve lost keys, or sleeping somewhere weird, or a call to bail out a friend, or a daughter’s boyfriend drama, or something more deeply strange … but generally, a voyage deep into the weird is not overboard with positivity, the world being the heavily-shadowed, fallen vale it is. But this weekend was both a hell of a weekend, and something truly beautiful: Our hopes, distilled, given and so given back to us; their good measure pressed down, shaken together, and running over.

In the last 48 hours the Northern Guard have danced and sang, sang and shouted, and all around us was love. We’ve partied through the deluge – our love unrequited – then, scarred but smarter, summoned all our bone thugs and whatever harmonies they offered to come good, finally, in our Waterloo, Lansing. After a stumbling, harrowing start, this edition of the Rogue & Gold are now just a result away from winning the conference outright, raising the possibility that, instead of scouring the internet for streams to watch the playoffs, we could be hosting them.

It’s important to remember, from the euphoric (albeit tenuous) perch on which we now find ourselves, where this club was less than two months ago. City had opened the NPSL season like the first act of a horror movie: Two draws against lesser clubs and a road loss to Ann Arbor had every warning klaxon sounding and every warning beacon flaring – we were in trouble, isolated, wounded, pursued by a feeling that we’d already blown it before we even knew everyone’s name.

And yet here we are, back where we thought we should be from the start, after all this sturm und drang. Nine is a row and counting, an incandescent conga-line of Victory dancing right up the mountainside, and the peak now in sight. It’s important to remember where we were before we were here, because we’ll be there again. Someday. Not today, though.

Transcendence

The world contracts in a downpour

One of the persistent criticisms of the Guard is that we’re not sufficiently wired into the game, that we’re some kind of sideshow wholly independent of the soccer on offer. And, frankly, there’s times where I can see that criticism landing, usually through the happenstance of a really involving chant crossing over a smoke-shrouded something happening on the field.

Then came Friday night, with its dearth of actual soccer, to serve as that criticism’s ultimate refutation: For 90 minutes after the lightning, Northern Guard stood and sang, chanted and danced in an effort to get the boys back on the field in a mood to dominate – and within minutes of the announced postponement, the songs were over, the stands emptying, even though the rain had slackened.

Without the ceremony of gametime at its center, we’re raising a cone of emotional energy to do … what, now? Thankfully we had Alex Wright and his new fiancee (now wife!) to focus our delight upon, but the rest of the monsoon was devoted to the unspoken business of letting the boys know that, like us freaks in the stands, they needed to keep their game-faces on as long as there was any chance of handing Ann Arbor ass-whipping.

It was a remarkable demonstration of group will. The ferocity of the heavier waves of the downpour was astonishing, our songs accompanied by both the static crackle of water-on-water and the basso thrumming of millions of large droplets of water slamming into thousands of human beings. The world contracts to the people one can see, the rest greyed out like they’re being rendered on an outdated video card. We sang on; the drums kept pounding, but the capos became disembodied voices when the rain hit hardest. Every flicker of lightning brought low groans into the music.

Time swiveled and shifted. We’d been here forever and always would be. We’ve been here five seconds and already feel at home. Everyone’s always welcome because everyone’s already here, one becomes by simply showing up and everyone eventually shows up, so everyone becomes us eventually. No one likes us, except us, which means everyone. We hate everyone else, who is no one else, because everyone becomes us eventually.

Part of the price one pays for that bit of transcendence is ‘difficult sight-lines,’ which translates into singing while squinting through smoke and a thicket of hand-made flags to try to see the actual football. So, no, we don’t always see the big goal, or the hard foul, or what have you. And that means that sometimes we’re caught reacting to things a little slowly – but it’s not because we’re not paying attention. It’s that we understand we have a responsibility above and beyond simply observing the football – we’re the chorus of fallen souls, reminding the living players to press on, press on for City, whatever the score, whatever the weather, whatever whenever forever. And because of that, we simply had to do what we did Friday night.

Photo by Tony Long (@tony_long17), all rights reserved

The Northern Guard Supporters and Detroit City Football Club have developed a delicate symbiosis with each other: NGS bring passion and spectacle, our creativity and rage channelled into something invisible yet palpable, a rare alchemy in a mundane world. The Club exists in that mundane space, enacting the contests and bottling that alchemical product for sale worldwide; like all rare things, its value climbs as word of it spreads. The weekend was a potent reminder of both the power of this symbiosis and of its tenuous nature.

Friday saw more (many more) than five thousand folks turn out for an American semi-professional team mired near the bottom of the table, saw the thousands-strong supporters group again create a cauldron of cheerful smoky menace. But if all that is familiar – and it is, incredibly; it is very familiar indeed – then so, increasingly, is the kind of thing that happened on Sunday. And it’s Sunday’s events that should remind us to cherish, and zealously guard, the incredible symbiosis of passion and freedom we enjoy.

In summary: The game down in HoosierTown was played in a very small facility, one obviously not used to travelling support (or, really, any support at all). As NGS began working its way through its song list, apparently the guy who owns the place and possibly the team became very agitated about profanity, eventually issuing an ultimatum that the next bit of profanity would result in removal of all of NGS. Threatened by the naughty words of fellow adults, he threatened to call the police. Someone called a member of NGS a ‘jagoff’ over the PA system, if that gives you some idea. It was a mess.

This, increasingly, is what away days are like for the Rouge Rovers – we are presented with an ever-growing list of ‘don’ts,’ a list that usually ends with the magical phrase ‘terms subject to change without notice.’ This is the thing to understand about our fallen world: When something says ‘subject to change,’ it sure don’t mean by you or by us. It means by They, by Them. By the Owners. And the changes they make almost always make the alchemy more difficult, if not entirely impossible.

They’ll say “Hey we’re all for channeled tribal passion but maybe with clean, non-tribal-passion language hehhhhhh?” like that makes sense, and you swoon a bit because you don’t want to explain the complex historical and cultural reasoning behind the swearing and the deaths-head get-ups and everything else that outsiders demand justification for, since this cornfield Mussolini is just going to go, “Ayuh, and there’s children here, too” and then your head will explode rather than argue any longer with a guy who doesn’t really give even half a fuck about what you’re saying, because he’s the Owner, goddamit; he told you to do something and that means you do it.

That’s where it gets tricky, because Do we? Do we really? All of this happens in about 15 seconds of real time, generally – some dude we’ve been mocking suddenly stands up and declares a bunch of things verboten.. And yeah, fuck that guy, yeaaaaah, but also we have to exist in the world somehow, and all of us have lives outside of transforming into a foul-mouthed columns of smoke. But how do we react? Do we explode in defiance, KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!, and up the ante, daring them to kick us out, singing “DO YOU HEAR THESE ASSHOLES SING? WE DON’T HEAR A FUCKIN’ THING!” in defiance, just light the fuse and watch the whole damned thing burn, fuck you fuck you fuck yooooooouuuuuuuuu … do we?

Next road game, it will be some other proto-fascist’s chance to make up rules ex tempore then threaten to use local muscle to enforce them. They do this, I think, not for any real concern over ‘the children’ above and beyond a general allegiance to a mealy-mouthed ‘unspoken code of conduct,’ but because they perceive Northern Guard’s posture, words and iconography to be exactly what they are: Dominance challenges. And because they confuse our behavior – which is focussed on supporting our guys’ sense of well-being and undermining their foes’ – with a dominance challenge in the real world, we must anticipate a whole spectrum of power displays, outbursts, or demonstrations of privilege. Because whatever we are in NGS, we’re surely not the Owners.

This is a thing we haven’t settled, entirely, I think. Our leadership has done an incredible job of defusing even the most ham-handed security buffoons and preventing drunk, committed supporters from following their ids into some kind of Green Street Hooligan fantasy. But in a situation like Sunday in Indiana – where an owner who issued no tickets could point to no listing of rules being broken, and yet NGS modified chants and dropped amplification to get along – the halftime performance of the Hokey-Pokey and a quick game of Duck-Duck-Goose were the perfect antidote. We’ll go along to get along, NGS said, but you don’t own even the tiniest bit of us. I love the MC5, too, but Bugs Bunny was a better anarchist.

The actual football

Tweaks, not revolutions: The crazy thing about the entirely more-successful soccer on offer this weekend is how little changed it was from the previous approach – the pressing was still there, the quick transitions, the high line – just all moderated slightly, every edgy choice pulled slightly back toward the center. As a consequence, there were fewer stretches of dominance for Le Rouge, fewer periods during which the ball stayed pinned deep against the opponent’s goal. But the happy effects vastly outweighed the sad; the deeper positioning of the team overall meant the team’s cadre of very pacy attackers had more space behind to exploit, while the defense seemed to relax and play more expansively when not tasked with holding a terrifyingly high line.

There’s a great moment in Bull Durham where Kevin Costner’s wily old catcher tells Tim Robbins’ clueless wunderkind pitcher, “Relax, all right? Don’t try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls – it’s more democratic.” I feel like Ben Pirmann finally stopped asking Detroit City to strike everybody out this weekend, and the democratic approach worked like a charm. More like this, please.

The attackers: I see that my man Andrew has anointed Shawn Lawson, and I’d like to just add my voice to those chanting prayers over Lawson as the oil soaks into his … game? I’m not sure how far I’m willing to go with this metaphor. Here’s what I see with Lawson: He’s a real striker, a guy who’s got a few tricks and whose every movement is trying to get at goal. He’s not combining for combining’s sake if there’s a shot to be had.

Combine Lawson’s quickness with the outside duo of Tyrone Mondi and Derrick Otim – each of whom has the speed to get behind and the skill to make a play once they’re back there – and this is an intimidating attack to play against. Expect to see anyone who’s scouted City to play deep and narrow and hope to bang one in on set pieces.

Plus ça change: Encouraging to see the more-vigorous rotation over the weekend result in quality minutes for a lot of guys. Louis Dargent showed he’s a real option in the back line, and the midfield didn’t immediately turn into a sinkhole filled with broken dreams in the absence of Dave Edwardson, which surprised this reporter just a smidge.

Tyler Moorman’s late goal gives City a win in a day devoted to the higher precepts of love, compassion and transcendence

As the players from Detroit City FC and Glentoran FC took the pitch Saturday night at Keyworth Stadium, the spectre of soccer’s history in Detroit – and the larger currents of history in which the visitors have been embroiled – seemed likely to loom over the actual football. As a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Glentoran’s summer sojourn as the Detroit Cougars, the buildup left unsaid the Glens’ traditions and history related to the Troubles in Ireland and the UK; as if in opposition, the first banner hung Saturday night in the Northern Guard supporters section was a mammoth antifa banner that fronted the drum section.

Then the football happened. The football, sometimes, teaches us things. Saturday, the football reminded us that – in a world that is decidedly fallen, in a time that is defined by so many sorrows – it’s okay to feel joy.

Tyler Moorman’s impassioned performance off the subs bench was the standout, creating a host of chances before finally banging home the game-winner in the 86th minute, but the real star was the power of the game of football to bind people to each other. Thirty minutes after Moorman’s goal sent Northern Guard into a writhing smoke-addled frenzy, Glentoran players and supporters were still trading songs with them. It sounds hackneyed to say ‘they left as friends’ until one experiences it.

Whatever the two clubs were or have been, they left as friends.

The football

The lineup is still getting some juggling, but that’s not what generated the differences in City’s approach to this match. Le Rouge displayed a firmer grasp on the tempo of the match, creating chances out of movement and patient possession while playing a cannier defensive line. The result was a much less helter-skelter version of football, and one in which the relative quality of players like Cyrus Saydee and Tyrone Mondi can find fuller expression.

Moorman hasn’t gotten many minutes for City yet this year, but it’s hard to believe that isn’t going to change going forward after his stirring cameo Saturday. Tyler may not dazzle with pace or trickery, but the palpable hunger he brought to the field was impossible to deny. He drew the (saved) penalty by winning a fight for the ball, then won the game by winning another fight for the ball and unleashing two nasty shots on goal, the second of which wound up in the side-netting.

The not-football

There’s choices implicit in how we view those who’ve come before us. We’re making them all the time, making editorial choices about the past, emphasizing certain narratives, putting others in the shade; it’s an automatic process. We can’t help it. We remember Grandma saying awful things sometimes, remember it in the same way we remember the next-door neighbor who moved out in fifth grade – a startling reminder of just how much we don’t really remember, moment to moment. And we can forgive Grandma because we remember other things about her; we remember warm cookies from the oven, or other, kinder words from a different situation, and we take the awful words in context of a whole person we know. We can’t change the past, nor can we afford to ignore it. We can love Grandma while disdaining her opinion on this or that. But if we can’t see around yesterday’s grievances, what hope tomorrow?

This feeling – this galling, fractious, maddening sensation of affront, this sense that one’s hope is a precious resource (and, like all resources in our fallen world, ripe for the plunder) – this is what supporting feels like.

We fortunate few in Northern Guard have had the privilege to fall face-first into supporting the most authentic club in American soccer. We have moved from strength to strength; our images are passed around the globe: “This is America?” We’ve watched our team win, and win, just never quite get over the hump. We’ve dumped our money into salvaging an ancient ballyard, and those images went viral, too.

Somewhere in there, we got this idea that our kittens would never become cats, that the sun-kissed bliss of our purest joy was the natural state of the Guard. We’ve grown used to getting credit, even outsized credit, for doing what we love. We are summer children, panicked at the first cold wind. This weekend, two draws that may have knee-capped our postseason aspirations before they begin, has delivered the winter’s wisdom: Hold on tighter.

This is what supporting is: Exasperating, infuriating, as exhilarating as the seconds between the steering giving way and the crash. We have a long way to go, and we’ve only just started.

About the actual football

In each game this weekend, City played a frenetic, high-pressing style, seeking to leverage the Rouge & Gold’s superior depth and pace to create quick chances on the break. In each game this weekend – as in the final friendly match against Dayton – the press worked very well early on, producing a host of half-chances and allowing City to take a lead into the locker room. In each game this weekend, the team sagged noticeably after halftime, as fatigue and injuries piled up, forcing substitutions, surrendering initiative, and dropping points.

Very direct: It’s early, but this group does not seem to have broken City’s persistent habit of ‘hasta el gol siempre.’ Perhaps it’s part of a counter-pressing tactic, or perhaps it’s just an ingrained habit left over from Cass Tech’s lumpy turf, but our boys try to get the ball forward immediately, either skipping midfield entirely or relying on low-percentage through-balls.

Very demanding style: The reliance on low-percentage, lightning-quick transitions means that, in practical terms, we’re always defending, and we’re not talking about dropping back into two banks of four and practicing the connected mindfulness that makes that arrangement so suffocating – quite the opposite. City are playing a proactive zone press that requires constant, aggressive engagement and an awful lot of hard running. It’s a big ask, physically, and it’s showing up early as the guys are ‘dropping like flies.’

Managing the game: It is impossible to watch City play and fault the effort – the guys are trying, running their legs into stumps trying to get this season off to a flying start. Sometimes, it looks like the team is trying too hard. The constant hard running, the balls straight forward to the attack when up a goal (or two), and the like make the team look naive, and their seeming surprise that the opposition has moments of ascendancy – a simple fact of the game that most players understand implicitly – underlines that impression.

If it stays broke, fix it: The Boys in Rouge have run aground on a tactical reef in the last couple years, and it’s at least partly down to their position as the lead dog in the mangy pack that is Michigan club football. There’s no shame playing defense against the big club; that’s true every league, everywhere. The book on us is pretty simple – play in a low block, hang on for dear life until we get a little tired, then run hard at our tiring defenders for the last half-hour. It produces games like … y’know … every game against a team at our level this season. Dominating performances that vanish like dawn mist right around the hour mark. The pattern isn’t new. Something different is required to resolve this impasse.

All we can offer is immortality. (Photo by Dion DeGennaro – @TheDukeNGS – all rights reserved.)

We coalesce around this feeling, sensual as velvet, barely encountered in daily life, a rare emotional element produced most reliably by suspending belief in a matrix of football: The exaltation of golden moments, the alchemy of interacting intelligences, and the tribal satisfaction of victory.

Our beloved Detroit City FC wrapped up its preseason in unlovely fashion on Saturday evening, squandering a 2-0 lead at home to draw Dayton Dynamo FC, 2-2. What moments of exaltation were on offer were, generally, overbalanced by the failings in the categories of ‘alchemy’ and ‘tribal satisfaction.’

The Rouge and Gold opened the game in a wildly high-pressing 4-2-4, with only new recruit Bakie Goodman and captain Dave Edwardson manning the acres of space in the middle of the pitch. The early returns on the press were promising, with Jeff Adkins and Cyrus Saydee making an interesting duo on the wings – Adkins slashing and direct, Saydee cannier, his instincts honed by years in the middle. But their pressing assignments kept them isolated from each other; instead, City insisted on playing as directly as possible in a given situation, going straight at goal, relentlessly.

Let’s just say that, tactically, this wasn’t 5-D chess; this was more like the contest favored by Monsieur Rochambeaux. After the feeling-out period, Dayton figured out that simply dropping midfielders deep would solve the press, but by then we had a 1-0 lead on an own goal. Adkins – playing, as ever, outside-in from the left – had pulled back onto his right foot and served one of those balls that maaaaaaybe is going to find the back post, curling in hard, and Dayton defender Peyton Mowrey panic-cleared it into his own net.

We scored! We shouted! My brain reminded me that these tactics were unsustainable! I’m reconstructing the goal from several eyewitnesses, since Jay-Baby’s cross took place somewhere around Sarge’s midsection, by my sight-line! But exaltation, kinda! Yess!

We got some real exaltation in the second half, and it came from two men whose names will be part of this club’s lore as long as there’s a club to have lore. In the 58th minute Edwardson, our Geordie captain, made a run into the right channel from central midfield, pivoting to take sharp entry pass from Goodman; his run and the attraction of the ball had the entire Dayton defense moving to anticipate him slashing into the penalty area, shifting as a unit back and to the left … leaving Saydee all alone on the right when Edwardson’s perfectly weighted backheel fell to his feet.

Given a moment to breathe, Cyrus pulled the ball back to his favored left foot and curled a shot into the far corner of the net, just sort of gestured it gently into the upper 90 from 20 yards out, setting off a generalized (and, this time, well-earned) pandemonium. Score, shout, smoke you out. Detroit City ain’t nothin’ ta fuk wit.

And then it all went a bit wobbly, and it’s so difficult to put away the feeling that we’ve seen this all before, isn’t it? Promising team? Familiar guys in form, new guys looking good – and then some kind of confusion hits the side, everyone panics, the shape is lost entirely as everyone just runs around madly, and we’re all left choking down another home draw like peanut butter on Wonder bread with nothing to drink? No? Just me?

As the evening’s work came undone – as substitutes layered onto the field, each gradually more anxious than the last – it became clear that, in some ways, the expectations and hopes of the supporters can be a burden to young players just trying to find their way. Since these expectations are manifestly unfair – as unfair as the rewards for satisfying them are otherwise unattainable – we should make them clear from the start, for those around Detroit City FC who don’t know:

All we ask is everything you’ve got. As Oscar Pareja would say, ‘busca la forma’ – find a way.

All we offer is adulation and a certain kind of immortality.

Up to you, gentlemen. It’s a tough gig, becoming gods. But now that you’ve got a chance, don’t ya wanna?

One of football’s really fascinating truths is that different people, in different situations, play this very simple game in wildly differing ways. Variations in coverage of space, in tempo, in attacking approach show football as a vicious physical battle, or a knife-edge concentration duel, or a teasing, sloe-eyed dance. The mental ecosystem of football is a verdant forest of ideas, all straining toward the Sun of the football universe: Winning the f–king game.

What they aren’t, emphatically, is thought experiments. Football styles emerge naturally from the terroir of their birth – the conditions on the field. The Scandinavian long-ball style didn’t come to be from any lack of touch; on rough, often snow-covered fields, hammering it to a finisher was a rational choice, not an aesthetic one. The classic laconic style we generally call ‘Latin’ has emerged everywhere football is played near the equator; ‘resting on the ball’ is a vital skill when most matches are held in sweltering conditions.

Detroit City FC’s style, to this point in its young history, has been based around winning physical challenges, pressing opponents high and hard up the pitch, and running straight at goal. It’s possible to see this approach as an emotional outgrowth of the energy brought by Northern Guard – the Guard works itself into a froth of love and rage as kickoff approaches, so it seems natural that the Boys in Rogue burst from the blocks in a berzerker frenzy, chasing the ball with wild-eyed fervor.

I’d argue, though, that the style was much more deeply influenced by the club’s original home, beloved Estadio CassTecha. Even in its later years, the Cass Tech field was terribly narrow and intractably lumpy. The tight confines meant that midfield congestion was constant, and the unreliable surface repaid City’s hard running with turnovers and odd-man breaks galore. If an opponent tried to get pretty, they’d find a traffic jam in midfield and a world of frustration with the ball at their feet. Northern Guard delighted in giving no respite, in grinding on subtler opponents until they concentration wavered. All the pieces fit together wonderfully.

The move to Keyworth Stadium has been a resounding success in every way except on the field. I’d argue that City’s on-field failures are at least partially down to porting that very direct, balls-to-the-wall pressing style to a completely different physical reality at Keyworth. The narrow, knobbly field is no longer doing half the work of turning the ball over for us, and so subtly the math starts to shift in the players’ minds – the turnover that happened once every three sprints starts to happen once every 12, and holy God in heaven it’s hot, and is the midfield stepping too or they’re just gonna play right through us again, fuuuuuuuuuuh. The lobbed long ball for the speedy forward to run down now skids on the fast surface and runs through to the keeper. Our berzerkers are loose, still crazed, their blood still stirring, but now in a world that expects and rewards nuance and cleverness.Detroit City FC’s style was a rational response to the physical reality of the ‘Cass & City’ era. What style best fits the new reality of Keyworth Stadium? Watch this space.